Replication data for: Production and Placement of Ph.D.s: 1902-2000

Building on the pioneering work of Somit and Tanenhaus (1963, 1964, 1967) that covers the first sixty years of the 20th century, we look at the growth and evolution of Ph.D. production in political science over the period 1902-2000, and at placement patterns in Ph.D. granting departments in the discipline in the decades between 1960 and 2000. Our main concern is with examining whether the consistent pattern found by these authors of segmentation in the placement market, with a small set of schools forming a relatively self-enclosed elite, but with a wide circulation of their Ph.D.s throughout the discipline, continued to hold during the last four decades of the 20th century. We find that it did. While we see an expansion over the course of the 20th century of Ph.D. production from a handful of schools to a set of 132 Ph.D. producing institutions, with a decreasing inequality in concentration of Ph.D. production as exhibited in Lorenz curves, an elite set of schools, drawing faculty mostly from themselves and each other, still play a unique role in shaping the teaching of Ph.D.s in the discipline.